Growing concerns

[j4]

Today my mum took me and addedentry to a garden centre and bought us an apple tree (a Worcester Pearmain), as well as some other smaller tasty plants (tomatoes, peppers, and blueberry bushes). Digging a hole big enough for even such a tiny tree takes a surprising amount of time and effort. We also planted the hazel sapling from my parents' garden; meanwhile, the hawthorn saplings cleanskies gave us are flourishing. We are literally putting down roots here.

The eventual plan for the garden is that everything should be edible; the main exceptions at the moment are the daffodils, crocuses, and rather lurid primulas which we planted hastily to stop the garden looking quite so much like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (it worked!), though our definition of 'edible' includes anything Richard Mabey thinks you can eat, which allows quite a lot of leeway.

The best thing about the garden, though, is that we have a BADGER! OK, we've only actually seen it in next door's garden, not ours (we've seen a fox and a hedgehog in ours, though) but given the mess it's made of theirs I'm quite happy with that. I tried to get a photo but you can only really tell it's a badger if you already know. But, really, an ACTUAL LIVE BADGER!

We've definitely made more progress with the garden than with the house; while the garden's growing, the house is falling down. OK, that's a slight exaggeration: it's suffering from a small amount of subsidence, which has caused cracks to appear all over the place. The buildings insurance people think this is a) probably due to defective drains (as opposed to, say, tunnelling badgers), and b) probably not covered by our insurance because we were sort of warned that it was a possibility in the survey. It has taken them weeks and weeks to do anything, and we're still waiting for the results of the investigation of the drains. I was horribly worried about it at first, and it certainly added to the general hiding-under-a-rock stress; but you can't sustain that level of worry for this long, and the house hasn't actually fallen down, so now I am just wishing they would hurry up and tell us how much it will cost.

The subsidence does mean that pretty much everything else to do with the inside of the house is suffering from planning blight, though; realistically, we weren't going to have redecorated everything by now (my parents still haven't redecorated everything in their house, and they've lived there for 24 years now), but we were hoping to get started on sorting out the kitchen. We still don't have an oven, but it's not a big deal. Maybe we don't need an oven after all (at least two people now have said we should get a Remoska instead). It would feel slightly odd making a deliberate choice not to have an oven, to get the kitchen refitted without leaving room for one; but probably no odder than it would feel to a lot of people not to have a TV.

On the other hand, not having a TV doesn't really mean it's impossible to watch TV; it's just impossible to watch it live. We watched the whole first series of Glee (if you don't know what Glee is -- and given that I don't often watch TV, I don't take it for granted that everybody knows about every TV show -- then the Wikipedia entry will explain with no spoilers above the fold) suffering the indignity of being a week behind the rest of the UK because 4OD didn't release the episodes until they'd shown the repeat. Episodes! Repeats! Things I hadn't thought about at all since I last watched TV regularly, back in the late 1990s. I tried to persuade addedentry to do the bittorrent thing so we could get the next episodes quicker, but he wouldn't, and I don't know how (honestly! I've just never done it). We also watched the first episode of the new Dr Who (it is probably internet heresy to say that I don't really get Dr Who, but, well) despite nearly being put off by the utterly rubbish bit with the food at the beginning.

There's lots of other things I want to write about but I don't really know where to start, and more and more I feel as though LiveJournal isn't really the place to write about them, because I feel like I don't know anybody here very well any more. I don't have real conversations with very many people any more at all, and that's my fault for not being good at keeping up friendships, but it still feels like I've retreated into a dark empty room somehow and I don't quite know how to come back to the party, because everything is elsewhere, and I'm not totally sure that it wouldn't be better just to slip away home in the dark without another word.

Comments

[brightybot.livejournal.com]

I haven't read all the comments below, so I hope I'm not repeating what anyone else has said... I just wanted to say that you might want to think about getting an oven regardless, simply because if / when you come to sell the place to someone else, they might be put off by the lack of oven. I say this from a position of having just been trying to sell a house without a parking space - we didn't give a damn about it, but it turns out everyone else in the world wants a parking space. I know it's a bit odd to think about selling your place when you've only just bought it - I guess it depends on the time frame you're thinking of staying there for. Andrew would like to add (cos he can't be arsed to comment separately) that his parents bought a Remoska and didn't get on with it terribly well - but they are elderly and particular about their cooking requirements.

In other news, yes that bit of Dr Who with the food was total rubbish wasn't it? The rest of the episode was good though. And great news re the garden - I love Spring and getting started with the garden again. I'm still trying to get ours tidy at the moment after the winter and also neglecting it horribly last year - but I might try and find the time to get some tomatoes etc growing in pots - I don't want to do too much because we'll be moving in a few months. Good luck with yours - have you got 2 apple trees so they'll pollinate each other? Not a problem if you have other apple trees near by. Love your idea of only growing stuff you can eat - thinking about what I want to do in the new place that may be largely true for us too (I'm counting lavendar as edible), although I don't think that I'll make it a rule.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course, about one day selling the house: I do expect us to install an oven but I was in two minds about a dishwasher precisely because it seems to be moving from luxury to expectation.

It's ironic that one of the advantages of home ownership is being free to paint the walls purple, but you can't paint the walls purple because future purchasers won't approve! (-:

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

It's ironic that one of the advantages of home ownership is being free to paint the walls purple, but you can't paint the walls purple because future purchasers won't approve! (-:

This made me laugh, but then I thought "Actually...no."

The programmes about decorating your house with minimalist cream interiors make people think that people want to buy houses with minimalist cream interiors. But actually, people want to decorate houses with minimalist cream interiors. That's why they watch the programmes about it. They don't want to buy them like that in the first place, because if they were perfect in the first place how could you MAKE YOUR PROPERTY MORE APPEALING, which is the goal of every right-thinking person in England not Britian?

I don't want to talk directly about property prices, but at some point in the not-too-distant future we're all going to be on the stupid property-inflation bubble again, and property pr0n will be back on the telly, and lots of people will be trying to buy cheap, sell dear, and lots more will be trying to find a place to live where they don't have a landlord who can kick them out, and purple walls/flying ducks/clutter says "You are getting great value because you're buying from some idiot who doesn't know the trick about minimalist cream interiors!"

Having said that, I would still get an oven. And, sadly, <lj user="brighty" is right about the parking space too.

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Er, I meant brightybot. When people see my HTML tags I feel as if they've seen my pants. And not my best pants, either.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

We planted a single apple tree but the advice has been fairly consistent that in urban and suburban gardens there will always been another tree close enough. Fingers cross(pollinat)ed!